Alfred Schütz’s response to the Royaumont discussion defends the scope of his critique of Husserl’s transcendental grounding of intersubjectivity. Published in French in 1959 and represented here by the German original printed in 1971, it proceeds through an extended engagement with Eugen Fink, followed by replies to Ingarden, Beck, Graumann, and Kelkel. Its governing distinction is between constituting the existence of the social world from the transcendental ego and elucidating the meaning of a social world already given. Schütz regards Husserl’s attempt at the former as unsuccessful without treating that failure as a refutation of phenomenology.
The reply to Fink first separates the usefulness of appresentation from its adequacy as a foundation for experiencing others. Another’s gestures, expressions, speech, and actions make an otherwise inaccessible inner life intelligible through signs. Yet this symbolic access cannot by itself establish transcendental intersubjectivity:
Daß die Konstitution der transzendentalen Fremderfahrung nicht auf Appräsentation allein zurückgeführt werden kann, ist freilich gleichfalls unbezweifelbar.
English translation: That the constitution of the transcendental experience of others cannot be traced back to appresentation alone is, of course, equally beyond doubt.
Schütz likewise accepts reciprocal reference between self and other but doubts that indefinitely iterated representations—Fink’s facing mirrors—explain the immediacy of being together. His constructive move is toward shared temporality. Whereas reflection grasps one’s own experiences retrospectively, another’s unfolding experience can be apprehended simultaneously. Speech exemplifies this coordination: the speaker’s successive acts, audible events, and the listener’s interpreting acts unfold together.
Auf diese Weise ergibt sich, vermittelt durch den Ablauf der Sprechakte in der äußeren Welt, eine Simultaneität der beiden inneren Zeitströme, die die Konstitution eines gemeinsamen Jetzt und damit eines Wir ermöglicht.
English translation: In this way, mediated by the unfolding of speech acts in the external world, a simultaneity of the two inner streams of time arises that makes possible the constitution of a shared Now and thereby of a We.
The shared present is thus more than a position in objective time: it connects two inner durations. Schütz presents this as a general experiential structure, relevant to mundane as well as transcendental intersubjectivity, rather than as a replacement derivation of other egos.
The remaining exchange with Fink tests the limits of transcendental explanation. Schütz accepts the co-originality of intersubjectivity and worldly objectivity within the natural understanding of the lifeworld, but cannot see how Husserl establishes it through transcendental constitution. Mortality sharpens the difficulty. I survive another’s death and experience the termination of our mundane relation; my own death cannot be survived within the world. If transcendental subjectivity cannot die, what becomes of the other’s transcendental subjectivity and its relation to mine? Schütz poses this as a challenge to the possibility of a plurality of transcendental subjects, while acknowledging that he has not examined the late manuscripts Fink invokes.
The shorter replies clarify what a phenomenology of social experience must presuppose and investigate. Against Ingarden’s ordering of processes of empathy, Schütz asks whether recognizing autonomous action already requires attributing goals, means, and motives to the other. With Beck he agrees that an ontology of the lifeworld must begin with the ego’s reciprocal relation to others, but rejects grounding that relation in a metaphysical need. He also rejects the doctrine of three egos without accepting that epoché necessarily falsifies social experience.
His answer to Graumann makes the positive methodological direction explicit:
Es ist dies nicht die transzendentale Konstitutionsanalyse, sondern die im „Nachwort zu meinen Ideen“ postulierte „Phänomenologie der natürlichen Einstellung“, deren Ziel es unter anderem zu sein hätte, die bis nun ungeklärten Grundlagen aller Sozialwissenschaften zu erhellen.
English translation: This is not transcendental constitutional analysis, but the “phenomenology of the natural attitude” postulated in the “Afterword to My Ideas,” whose aim would have to include elucidating the hitherto unclarified foundations of all the social sciences.
The response’s significance lies in this redirection: taking the social world as ontologically given permits phenomenological inquiry into its meaning and the foundations of social science. Finally, Schütz tells Kelkel that the appearance of solipsism arises through artificially excluding underlying worldly intersubjectivity. He distinguishes his criticism of constitution from an accusation of technical deduction, explaining how translating Ableitung as déduction occasioned the misunderstanding. The closing linguistic clarification reinforces the work’s governing restraint: identifying an overextended explanatory claim need not invalidate Husserl’s methods or their continuing philosophical use.
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